So for the past year I’ve been refining my guitar rig. Before then, the sound had pretty much been the same. I always liked my rig and how it sounded, but after 10 years of the same thing, it was time to expand my playing, songwriting, and just the overall sonics. Everything on the board has been there forever. The core sound has always been a Fender Guitar, Fender Amp, & Big Muff. The Silverface Twin I used was ran through a Marshall cab for more low end and beef. Anyway I started putting together the new sound a little over a year ago, It started with getting a Fender Twin Reverb II. I’ve never been a fan of combos, but wanted to experiment with something that was more punchy and dynamic. To be honest I haven’t been super happy with the sound of the Twin II. Being a combo, it just doesn’t have as full a sound as a closed back amp. Also, as part of a trio we’re all covering a lot a ground, so we have to sound full. The combo is punchy but not dense enough for what we’re doing. Fast forward, the base of the new rig is a Strat with a Twin Reverb II. For the new sound I started using a ProCo RAT for distortion and a MXR Classic Overdrive for a gritty clean tone and leads. At first it was ok sounding but the RAT is a super aggressive sounding distortion and doesn’t have a lot of low end. Also the main thing I didn’t like, was it would clip if you cranked it past 2 o’clock. It got to the point I was just using the MXR for all of the distortion. Since the RAT was clipping so quick, it was getting really annoying and sounding like mush. In the mean time I ended up getting a Boss DD-7. With a vintage Big Muff, Small Stone and Digitech Delay, my board had no space left on it, plus tone was getting sucked by the Electro Harmonix stuff. The DD-7 had a few cool settings I was looking for plus a small foot print. It’s like a swiss army knife of delay. To get my distorted sound together after doing a ton of research, I decided on the Blackout Effectors Blundberuss Fuzz. After initially going for more of a overdrive / distortion sound, I ended up going back to fuzz. Not your average fuzz though. The Blunderbuss is a mega loud and flexible pedal. It almost has too many possibilities. It ended up being the foundation for my new tone. The Blundebuss is like a vintage Big Muff, but with more ways to dial in a better sound. It also can do some straight up disortion or crunch. Like I said though, it’s a loud pedal, high output, so it’s over the top. The only thing I don’t like about it, is it has some kind of gating when the signals tales off, and it cuts the signals off. It almost sounds like clipping, but it’s not. It’s a gate. So that’s kind of a bummer if you’re trying to get some sustain happening. Besides that, it’s a solid pedal. To be continued…